With almost 1.5 billion users daily, Facebook is one of the biggest and most populated social networks. If you own a business, you can’t afford to skip out on advertising on Facebook. But how to go about it?
In order to help you realize a better return on investment, or ROI, we’ve compiled a list of 10 Facebook advertising tips you can’t miss. We’ve broken them into four sections: guidelines, strategy, cost, and effectiveness. Read on to make the most of your Facebook ads.
Facebook Advertising Guidelines
Before you spend time creating social media ads in Facebook, it’s important to familiarize yourself with their technical and other guidelines. Failure to do so can have consequences ranging from your ad not running to legal ramifications.
Check out the tips below to get to know Facebook’s guidelines for advertisements.
Tip #1: Sizing And Speculations
Across the board, regardless of the type of content in your ad, you shouldn’t have more than 90 characters of text. Other specifications vary depending on the content type.
In image ads, your ad should be 1200 x 628 pixels in size, with a 1:9 or 1:1 ratio. Your headline can’t exceed 25 characters, and you need to limit your link description to 30 characters.
Video ads can have a thumbnail 1200 x 675 pixels. The resolution must be, at minimum, 720p. The ratio should be 16:9 and the file needs to be no larger than 2.3 GB.
Speaking of the file, a video must be in either .mp4 or .mov format. Like image ads, your link description can’t exceed 30 characters, nor can your headline exceed 25 characters.
Carousel ads can have headlines as long as 40 characters, but link descriptions can only be 20 characters. The image or video ratio must be 1:1, and image size should be 1080 x 1080 pixels.
If you’re running a slideshow ad, aim for 1289 x 720 pixels. Your headline can be 25 characters and your link description can be 30. You have three ratio choices:
- 16:9
- 1:1
- 2:3
Tip #2: Regulations And Consent
On May 25, 2018, a major change rocked the internet: GDPR. Basically, GDPR governs consent regulations. You’re now required to inform users why you track their data, how you track it, and what you track; they need to then consent to being tracked so.
What does this mean for running Facebook ads?
- Custom audiences may get trickier to use if you can’t prove you have consent
- Ads to generate new leads will need to link to your privacy policy and receive consent–in real time
- Use of the Facebook pixel might become limited
Basically, you always need to prove your usage of people’s data has a legal foundation.
Facebook Advertising Strategy
Putting a strategy in place is key to a successful ad campaign. Remember that your strategy need not be set in stone. You want to remain flexible–but knowing where you’re headed can help you pivot and adapt quickly.
Tip #3: Plan Long-Term
What are your goals? How will you measure your ad campaign’s success or failure? How much do you plan to spend, overall, on your Facebook ad budget?
These are just some of the questions you’ll want to answer before you run your first ad campaign. You’ll need to know also what you must put into each campaign:
- Do you need to film a video?
- Do you need to hire a photographer?
- Do you need to do more keyword research?
Ask yourself these questions and try to lay out the answers in a written, long-term strategy.
Tip #4: Target
Before you even get into Facebook ad design, you’ll want to know who you want to view your ads. How old are they? What genders do they identify as?
Beyond questions of demographics, you’ll want to be able to articulate their interests. What fan pages and groups do they follow? What are their interests and behaviors?
The right targeting can mean the difference between a good and bad ROI. For example, if you can target your ad to an audience size of 75,000 or less, you’ll have an easier time getting a return on investment.
A smaller audience size means your ad campaign is hyper-targeted toward those who are most likely to engage with the ad.
Tip #5: Track And Adapt In Real Time
One of the many benefits of Facebook advertising versus traditional marketing is you can track the results of an ad campaign as the campaign is running. This means you can pivot and adapt mid-campaign.
This ability does not exist offline. You can’t send out a batch of 1,000 postcards, and then notice after 400 people have thrown them away that you need to change the remaining 600 and put those changes in place. In this example, you’d be stuck paying for ineffective postcards, even if you realize in real time that they’re not working as you’d hoped.
We’re not suggesting you obsess over your campaign results on Facebook. But check in once a day to see how your audience is responding, and make any changes you deem necessary.
Facebook Advertising Cost
Keeping within your preset budget is a crucial part of realizing a good ROI. You’ll want a low CPC (cost per click), a low CPM (cost per mille/1,000 impressions), and a high CTR (click-through rate). In order to achieve such favorable figures, we recommend:
Tip #6: Test Before You Buy
As of April 2017, 5 million businesses were advertising on Facebook. There’s a lot of competition in the market, so you don’t want to burst out of the gates before you’ve tested your ad campaign. You’re going to spend money on it, so you should do everything you can to ensure its success.
Testing will show you how an audience reacts. There are a couple approaches to testing. If you have a fan page with at least 100 or so fans of your brand, you can post the ad campaign there for free and see how people interact with it. Similarly, you can run an ad campaign for a minimal amount to see how it performs.
You should test your landing pages, your calls to action (CTAs), your headlines, your text, and your images or video. Don’t leave your Facebook ad campaign to chance. Test first, then buy.
Facebook Advertising Effectiveness
Now that we’ve covered tips in Facebook advertising guidelines, strategy, and cost, we’ll turn toward effectiveness for our last four tips. After all, without effective ads, your campaign won’t return a good ROI.
What does it take to make an effective ad? You’ve got to engage viewers. The best ways to do so are to educate and entertain. Keep that in mind as you read through these tips.
Tip #7: Lights, Camera, Action
On Facebook, viewers tally up more than 8 billion video views every single day. If you ignore video, you’re making a mistake–plain and simple. Video ads increase both your relevance score and engagement score, which Facebook uses to determine how to show your ad.
This means video can help you get more impressions but at a lower CPC or CPM rate. Remember that brevity is the soul of wit–keep it short in most cases. Captions can also help your ad visibility, since many viewers will watch videos without sound.
Tip #8: Get Familiar With Ad Types
Facebook allows you to generate all sorts of different ads with different goals. Here, we’ll talk about the two most popular: traffic campaigns and engagement campaigns.
Traffic campaigns are designed to increase traffic to a landing page. These are great when you want more email subscribers, webinar attendees, or potential customers to visit particular landing pages on your website.
Engagement campaigns seek to get reactions from readers. People might comment on your ad or page, share your posts, or choose one of the emotive reactions. They might also click on your ad to get an offer.
Understanding the different ad types–and choosing the type that best aligns with your strategy–can increase your ad campaign effectiveness.
Tip #9: Get Familiar With Tools
Take the time to get to know what types of tools you can use when creating and running Facebook ads. Tools like Audience Insights, Creative Hub, Canvas Ads, and Power Editor are all helpful to know. These can help you narrow your targeting and get inspired when it comes to creating ads.
For example, Canvas has three different templates you can choose from:
- Get New Customers
- Sell Products
- Showcase Your Business
If you’re in the lead acquisition phase, getting new customers might be the right type of ad for you. If your goal is to boost your ecommerce, the Sell Products template is a good call. Showcase Your Business ads will help you spread brand awareness.
Tip #10: Storytelling
People love stories. We have done since we first started painting on caves–maybe even before. Stories engage. They educate and entertain.
They build connections between viewers and you, and your brand. Focus your messaging on telling a story, and you’ll be more likely to have a successful ad campaign on Facebook.
Facebook Advertising Tips: Final Thoughts
We hope these Facebook advertising tips are helpful to you in your efforts to engage more with your audience and grow your audience.
If you have any questions about how to use Facebook or social media marketing to realize your goals for your online properties, we invite you to contact us. We’d love to help you navigate these waters.